A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas Read Free Book Online Page B

in Seville would dissolve the secret society—greeted him with laughter, holding aloft a black flag on which, over the most ferocious skull, he had embroidered the slogan: ONWARD TO A SILKY PROSE .
    Kromberg’s companions tried in vain to calm him, to convince him that there was no one on the summit. That night he wrote down everything he thought he’d seen—the Portuguese hat, the crows, the Odradek with the flag—and, depositing his diary in the snow, he went out and lost himself in the darkness of the Himalayan summit, never to be seen again.
    Salvador Dalí’s Odradek had a markedly merry and musical air. Furthermore, it was emphatically erotic: nothing less than a self-pleasuring Chinese violin, a melodic instrument with a vibratory appendage, whose function was to be introduced—abruptly and brusquely—into the anus, but also, and preferably, into the vagina. Following insertion, an expert musician would slide his bow over the strings of the violin, playing not the first thing that came into his head, but a score expressly composed with masturbatory aims; through an astute bestowing of the frenzied sections—interspersed with moments of calm—the musician would bring the instrument’s recipient to orgasm at the precise moment the rapture notes were attacked in the score.
    Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Odradek wasn’t exactly erotic. It showed itself in a hotel mirror in Prague, giving the writer a considerable fright: “Looking in a mirror that suddenly reflects me, I find myself truly resembling my father. Am I going to be my father? Does this mean my whole life has been a fantasy lived in another person’s name? Are we nothing more than our ancestors, and never ourselves?”
    He spent the day he wrote this in a state of constant unease; for a Shandy, nothing is worse than the insolent irruption of an Odradek, above all if the Odradek shows up intending to make a nuisance of itself. There were clearly also kind and timid Odradeks, but these tended to be boring. In general, Odradeks were somber, pathetic, trouble-making objects or creatures who took pleasure in frightening their hosts or victims.
    That day, Gómez de la Serna had a fright like never before, but he was able to take courage and keep a sense of humor about him, and ended up giving his father’s ghost the boot; he smashed every mirror in his Prague room.
    But what were the portables doing in Prague if they had planned neither conference, nor manifesto, nor terrorist act, and had no plans for another party, or anything at all? I’ve already said that, in my opinion, the portables traveled for the mere pleasure of it, and so they could tell each other stories; but the fact is that their journey—like any novel or poem—was in constant danger of not making sense, and perhaps this was what most appealed to them about the trip.
    Speaking of risks, I ought to point out that they proliferated in Prague. Very quickly, the Shandies had the unforgettable impression that at certain hours of the night or at dawn, mysterious voices not belonging to their Odradeks began to regularly whisper hushed and mysterious advice. At times, a light tremor, impossible to explain, passed through the old walls of the Jewish quarter, letting out noises that would course through the brickwork, coming out from the drainpipes. If anyone had bothered to look in that labyrinth of the Odradeks, they would have found bouquets of wilted myrtle: bridal bouquets, swept along in the unclean water, in which also hid the quiet, barely perceptible play of gestures and postures of those golems that were attached to the dangerous Odradeks.
    “Dangerous, yes,” Marcel Duchamp says to me on the Portbou café terrace. “So I encourage you to tread carefully with this champagne cork, apparently so well-balanced in its disingenuous equilibrium on that curtain rail: this cork
also
comes with a golem.”
    This memory is always evoked for me in the present tense. Suddenly I’m about to